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Much like Christmas for me, Chinese New Year is the annual opportunity to spend time with the family, play games, repay your sleep debt and eat often and well. Unlike Christmas, conversation occurs mostly in one of three Chinese dialects, most of your meals are taken outdoors and New Year’s Day cuisine is completely vegetarian!

Click through on the video below for my take on the Yap family celebration.

Old Dhaka hums with mundane daily life so alien to outsiders. Bangladeshis cannot comprehend how the outside world operates, but equally, outsiders have little idea of the daily going-ons of the flower merchants on Hindu Street who watch a flow of rickshaws, pedestrians and mopeds travel in one line in either direction past their stalls. Who understands the bus conductors, hanging from their tin boxes, whose once painted exteriors display more scratch than paint now. The loud speaker salesmen (!) or boatmen who’ve developed a technique much like a fish’s tail to propel their tiny craft through the motorway of overladen crosstraffic from one side of the old Ganges to the other demand your attention. The cardboard merchants, the snake charmers, tea stirrers, bottle collectors and rickshaw wallahs. Dhaka is rickshaw wallahs…it costs $100 to buy a rickshaw, but you wouldn’t dare not spend the additional $60 decorating it before it’s street-ready:

Things have never quite returned to pushing the condemned from the top of minarets, but where Mohamed meets Marx, the Soviet regime of terror favoured by Stalin lives on.

The world is largely ignorant of this mumblistan, the seventh most corrupt country in the world, whose government holds so many thousands of innocents in jail under the auspices of the war on terror and whose cotton is boycotted by many western clothes retailers due to slave and child labour concerns.

But the country has extraordinary history. In 1405, within just 30 years, Timur, the country’s national hero, built an empire that stretched from India to Syria, centred on Samarkand, his sumptuous capital. The resplendent buildings of his reign have been restored and rebuilt.